Rosada v. Civiletti

• Jurisdiction: United States

Rosada v. Civiletti

621 F.2d 1179 (2d Cir. 1980)

Facts

In 1978, petitioners Efran Caban, Raymond Velez, Pedro Rosada, and Felix Melendez, inmates at the Federal Correctional Institution atDanbury, Connecticut, filed suit with the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut seeking release from federal incarceration. The petitioners all were U.S. citizens who had been arrested in Mexico in November 1975, and all were sentenced to nine years' imprisonment by the Mexican courts for violating Mexico's drug laws. In December 1977, the inmates were transferred from Mexican prison to U.S. prisons pursuant to a treaty between the United States and Mexico allowing them to serve out their Mexican penal sentences in U.S. prisons. Under the terms of the treaty, a U.S. citizen convicted of a criminal offense in Mexico may transfer from Mexican custody to American custody provided that (1) the offense committed must be generally punishable in the United States and is neither a political nor immigration offense; (2) the transferring prisoner must be both a national of the United States and not a domiciliary of Mexico; (3) only prisoners with at least six months remaining on their sentence with no appeal or collateral attack pending in Mexican courts are eligible; and (4) Mexico, the United States, and the transferring prisoner must give consent to the change in custody. The treaty also provided that the transferring nation have exclusive jurisdiction over proceedings brought by a transferring offender to challenge, modify, or set aside convictions or sentences handed down by its courts to prevent prisoners from challenging their convictions in the country to which they were being transferred. The petitioners in this case argued that their consent to transfer had been unlawfully coerced and their continued detention by U.S. authorities based on the convictions in Mexico, violated their right to due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. The District Court granted the inmates' petition for release from federal incarceration after finding that their consent to transfer had been unlawfully coerced by the brutal conditions in the Mexican prisons they were in and, emphasizing circumstances unique to the petitioners, concluded that they would have signed anything to get out of Mexico. Civiletti, the Attorney General of the United States, appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

Issue

Whether prisoners voluntarily and intelligently agreed to forgo...